It does seem to make sense to move phones towards the desktop. They are, or will soon be, powerful enough for most uses. However

- the price is outrageous. I can get a very good netbook or even laptop for less money- the whole setup is proprietary. With the accelerated mobile phone upgrade cycle, it means it's money down a very fast drain. A netbook/laptop will be easier to re-use.

HP's tap to synch approach makes a lot more sense until these two issues are solved, if they ever are.Reply

Thanks for this great preview, this phone seems to be a really great device :)One question though, do you know if the LED is multi color ? You can test this with Blink (you have to switch off screen after choosing a color). It's on the market : https://market.android.com/details?id=imoblife.bli...

My carrier has no influence on what phone or what software is on that phone at all. I never buy my phone through my carrier, always just on 1 of the many gsm webshops there are over here.

Most of the time i just buy my phone when ever a phone comes around that i want to have, i don't look at my contract at all (i also could do that but i most of the time don't do that)

So buy my phone for 600 euro.. then i go to my carrier when my contract ends (when ever that is) and then i ask them what the best sim only contract there is what they can offer me.. (1 or 2 years). Currently the 2 year was the best so what i get was a 25 euro contract per month where i get 40% off over 2 years, and the first 6 months i did get an additional 50% off on top over that.So that's the first 6 months 17.5 euro off (105 euro) and then 18 months 10 euro off (180) thats in total 285 euro that i save, so that i only payed for my high end phone 315 euro on a contract of 25 euro.. And i can buy whenever i want a new phone and extend my contract when thats around the corner.. they are not related to each other.Reply

Nope it can't mirror. This is why the Optimus 2x is better to me. It does TRUE mirroring of the WHOLE UI so no need for this silly laptop dock when I can buy a cheap laptop and do basically the same thing for FREE.Reply

I was confused when I saw that price. Why would anyone pay that? Then it got me wondering... are we not able to simply plug the phone into our own monitor using the appropriate hdmi cable? And then plug in a usb keyboard and mouse? Who needs a even a $190 dock? This article didnt really explain why. I've got 3 usb keyboards and just as many mice laying around. The last thing I want to do is buy another to satisfy their need for revenue.Reply

The whole controversy over pentile matrix just scream of something Apple fanboys kicked up to attack the competition. Here's guessing both of the editors you mentioned carry an iPhone everyday. Was I right? Gee, what a shock. They probably also love the "retina display" even though that was the biggest bunch of marketing hooey ever. For multiple reasons, not least of which scientifically the resolution has to be a good deal higher than 960X640 for the human eye to not be able to make out pixels at the distance the iPhone is actually used.

The Apple bias is the media is just insane. Almost every single tech editor in the world just happens to have an iPhone as his personal phone, even though it's the worst phone on the market.

Anyways my point is, NOBODY in the real world cares about this. I have a Captivate, and I NEVER would have suspected any problem with the display if I hadn't read about it, in fact I still didn't know what the problem supposedly was after reading about it!

I'm afraid I dont know if I can go back from Super Amoled, the off angle viewing is just so good, when I look at my friends Droid X or iPhone, they just look so washed out and terrible. Even though I'm not exactly thrilled with some aspects of Samsung, and was considering picking up an Atrix or Inspire, the sad fact is I seriously am beginning to wonder if I'll ever be able to go back to a regular LCD on a phone now, they just look so bad.Reply

Fer me the iPhone display (even if the name is marketing) has a superior definition for text and images and thanks to it being IPS technology the colors are more natural and viewing angles are very good for a LCD (even though poorer than AMOLED of course).

I hated Nexus One fuzzy text and everybody it's entitle to their opinions without having to be called names. I can tell you that there are persons like me that doesn't stand the grilled texture vision of this kind of LCD and even though I could live with that I will avoid it whenever I can.Reply

Anand stated clearly it was a matter of preference. I have an OG Droid and friend has a Dinc, girlfriend has a DroidX. I am not a fan on the Dinc when reading text. The TFTs to me just seem much more crispReply

I personally care about this a lot. I went to the AT&T store to buy a Captivate and was very distracted by the display's flyscreen effect--that was before I ever heard of pentile (which I learned about after getting home and googling what was wrong with these screens).

To me the effect is NOT subtle and is very annoying, it's a dealbreaker for me. I thought my next phone was going to be the Atrix but looks like it will be Inspire or Galaxy S II instead.Reply

I'm currently an OG Droid user and I was thinking of getting a Droid BIONIC (almost the same as an Atrix) when it comes out. But this Pentile screen may make me reconsider.

I was really happy to read that there would be a higher res screen on these phones, but I hate that Pentile matrix whenever I see it on my friend's Galaxy S phone. Bugs the crap out of me and I'm by no means an Apple fanboy.Reply

This laptop dock thingy, that isn't 1/4 as good or powerful as a real netbook,adds $300 to the price...plus I'm not sure but I thought I read somewhere the dock thing is $130 on top of that...but even if it's "only" 300, it makes no sense AT ALL. It's not even more portable.

The only way this possibly makes sense, is if by using the phone hardware, you save money on the laptop dock thing, aka it was available for say, 99 dollars. Even then it's pretty dicey, as almost everybody probably already has a laptop, and a good portion already own a netbook as well.

Plus, though it's technically illegal it works fine, with a tether program like PDA net, you can tether (even on an unrooted phone) without paying the extra 20, which you cant do with this dock AFAIK (since, it doesnt run windows to run the PDA client).Reply

The reason the Atrix 4G (and consequently the Inspire 4G) suffer from UMTS-sh upload speeds is because AT&T requests the handset manufacturer to disable HSUPA. The same thing occured with every smartphone besides the iPhone 4 on AT&Ts network. I have a Captivate that has HSUPA enabled by flashing the modem firmware with an HSUPA enabled firmware. Just a little insight. I'm enjoying the review.

It's up to you whether you'll take this as a compliment (personally) or an insult (to the site), but Anand, you are by far the best writer at Anandtech. I'm far more likely to read every word of an article if you wrote it, and as I started to read this one I was immediately able to tell that you were the author.Reply

On the "The qHD Screen: A Pentile LCD?" you have a thumbnail of both the iPhone LCD and the Atrix LCD unfortunately when you click on the thumbnail they both link to the same picture.

I'm really interested in this phone but the screen seems like I'd fall into the "it would bug me" group. I pre-ordered this phone now looking at that screen I'm starting to have my doubts. I think the screens are the 2nd most important feature on these smartphones.Reply

I thought I remember seeing that the power button doubles as a fingerprint scanner on the Atrix but I didn't see you mention it.

Interesting perspective on how things work in the technological fields...this may be the first of it's kind but probably won't be the one that really hits that balance of price and performance just yet...nice demonstration unit though.

Anand, you've written that the OptimuxS2X has 4" Super AMOLED display instead of the IPS LCD that it has.Also, it would be great if you would give your opinion on the call quality via the earpiece and the loudspeaker quality. Do the dual microphones improve the call quality significantly ?

Until smartphones have modular and universal OS capability, they won't replace computers.

When you can just hop over to Google's website and download a new, universal version of Android, and then hop on over to Motorola's website to download your device's appropriate drivers, THAT will be the moment that smartphones can truly attempt to replace PCs in the mainstream market.

Until that happens, walled-garden systems, lack of speedy updates and OS fragmentation will keep them in their current niche.

Oh, and they should *ship* with root access easily enabled, just like a computer. No exploits or hacks required, a simple flipping of a switch in the OS to enable superuser permissions.Reply

Can Ananad (or anyone who held the phone) tell me how bad the text "fuzziness" was in the browser, on a zoomed out view? Some reviews said it appeared "pixelated" and unreadable despite of the qHD screen.Reply

Anand can you give some more detailed impression/images of the Atrix screen. If it really is a pentile matrix it would be an RGBW scheme. This is unfortunate because it is basically like adding a white sub pixel to the existing red, green, and blue sub pixels and calling it twice the resolution. So by my calculation the screen is really ~679x382 if you considered RGBW as one pixel. I would assume that the impression of this screen would therefore be that of a lower resolution than 800x480 and theoretically the white sub pixels would allow it to either be brighter when displaying non color saturated images or to lower the back light and save power. Since your graph clearly shows a lower contrast ratio the only possibility is power savings at the expense of quality. PLEASE correct me if I am wrong but this does seem to be the case.Reply

Counting the number of subpixels, when using a system that uses both subpixel rendering and metamer rendering (where one uses the fact that white can be produced by both a single W and the combination of RGB) allows the display to use only two subpixels per pixel *on average*.

Yes, the RGBW system allows the power to be cut roughly in half.

The full on white to full off black contrast ratio is dependent upon the LCD technology itself, how much light leakage occurs in the dark states. It has nothing to do with the subpixel arrangement or color filter system, or its mode of operation. Though, the Dynamic Backlight Control does improve the contrast when dark images are shown, as reducing the backlight brightness makes the darkest states darker, while maintaining the brightness of the intermediate grey states. But that wasn't tested here.Reply

Hi Anand,I am planning to get the Atrix carrier free version from USA, can anyone tell me if this phone will work in India or is there any unlocking required after taking a carrier free version. Please. Thanks in advance.. If anyone else knows the reply please let me know ASAP, PleaseReply